Value

The best present I ever bought my Mum was a Tablet PC.  It wasn't the most expensive present I ever bought, it wasn't even the one I thought she'd like the most, but it turned out to be the best thing I ever bought her, for the simple reasons that she enjoys using it, she uses it every day, and it lets her enjoy her own interests.  She had a laptop which she never got much use out of and found too restrictive, she's always been quite savvy with technology but I wouldn't have said it was something she particularly enjoyed using, rather it was always something used out of necessity.

I wasn't expecting it to be used so much and to enable her to do so much.  When I look back on some of the other presents I have bought over the years and the various price ranges they have encompassed, it makes me realise that value is a very hard thing to judge.  A price is cost not value, although most retailers attempt to add a premium to most of their products to capitalize on the value they have to the person who wants to buy them.

I have many jobs, figuratively and literally.  One of these is that of a programmer and a web designer.  I've been programming computers since I was six years old when I learned how to code in BASIC on an Amstrad CPC-464.  Programming comes naturally to me, and when I first started learning about web design that came naturally too.  Although my ability is very much one that flourishes in the back-end of websites in the thousands of lines of code that underpins everything, my creativity when it comes to the visual element is rather basic, I prefer to keep things simple most of the time, I am not an artist when it comes to this sort of thing. 

As someone who can create websites however I am acutely aware that people pay a lot of money for them, and to me that price is excessive.  I recognise that price has very little to do with the actual cost of production and incorporates very heavily the value of the product to the client.  The price of a website in reality is determined by how difficult it is for you to create your own and the learning curve for most people to do that is too steep because they have no background or understanding in computing at all.

Like the tablet I bought for my Mum, the website I would create for you would likely be sold to you much closer to cost, not because I don't understand how much you need it but just because I don't see the point in adding arbitrary pricing to a product to create a margin that is excessive just because you need it and I can give it to you - as you've probably guessed this isn't my main source of income, it's not what I do for a living.  It's a hobby and nothing more really.  Ultimately to succeed in business you need to know how to price a product to incorporate its value to the customer as well as its cost.  The fact remains I find that process intriguing but ultimately a mystery, on value alone, given how much my Mum has got out of it, that tablet really should have been priced higher, I'm not complaining about the fact it wasn't, just remarking on the fact that judging value seems to be incredibly difficult to predict, and perhaps is really more centred around the individual - most businesses don't price products individually though, I haven't decided whether I think that's a good or a bad thing, you can ponder that one yourself.